PowerPlay Magazine

*An error was discovered and has since been corrected. Please re-download the file if you had done so prior to Saturday Nov. 16 2013 at (10:34am ET, 4:34pm CET)*

Hello again friends. I know by now you are used to my articles on the sports academy but let me deviate here for a moment to a semi-related topic: player growth. Watching the market, it is obvious that people are after the high-EQ youngsters. It got me thinking, what is more practical: 95EQ and 300 OR or 80EQ and 450 OR? The market dictates the 95EQ 300 player but is it worth spending the big-bucks to acquire elite qualities when mid-80s come at a steep bargain in comparison? I decided to break down the numbers, surprise, surprise!

First thing first, we know training is linear. That is, given a certain age, C/L, staff efficiency and facility setup, a 40Q attribute will train at 50% the speed of an 80Q attribute. Given the nature of what I am presenting, I decided to type up the bulk of this report in LaTeX, which is not supported in the PPM Mag editor so I apologize if it is difficult to read.

In the snippet above I quote a comparison of two players. If you want to test out a few of your own feel free to download a simple Excel spreadsheet I made HERE. The numbers correspond to two players of mine (Player 1, Player 2) whom I was interested in comparing. Feel free download (via the file menu) and test various players of yours as you wish. As it turns out, I spent 100M on McNicholas and he is projected to catch Crichton in 619 days. To put this into perspective, that is July 27^th, 2015. So, to illustrate my point here, I pulled Crichton and got him for free. Given his higher-OR and decent qualities (84 EQ) out of the gate it will take 5.5 seasons for my 100M purchase to catch him due to his ~170 points lower OR despite a 15 point larger EQ. This is for a max training rate of 1.5 OR/day. Adjusting to 1.85, which is more on the order for players like this given my facilities and staff, it shortens the catch-up time by 1 season to April 1, 2015.

While the numbers are a bit starling, they do reassure me that spending the extra money on young, high-OR players with good qualities is favourable over similar-aged players with lower-OR but slightly-better qualities. Sure, if you find a high-OR, high-AQ player life is good. But you then come down to competing with the richest clubs in the world for those players. And, in the end, is it worth the 500M for one player or would you be better off spreading that money around multiple purchases? Or heck, even just investing in your SA and guaranteeing yourself higher-OR pulls on average as illustrated by my SA investigation. See, we've come full-circle here, I'm not completely off topic ;).

Time for me to wrap up. Thanks for reading and keep in mind the caveats with this brief report. Happy PPMing all!

PS. If you're wondering what the "TR" is for a player, you can estimate what a 100Q'd attribute would train like for a nearly-identical player on your team by looking at his current training rate. TR=(100/Q_i)*tr where Q_i is the max trained Q of the player and tr is the average rate at which he trains that quality. Also note, you may get an error when changing values in Excel. Just read what the instructions are when hovering over the cell and ensure you're within those bounds. Excel isn't the best at interpreting the restrictions imposed by Google Drive.